The Brilliant Ajax, Part One

Who's a Jew? - That's the Question

Over 100,000 of the 140,000 Jews that lived in The Netherlands before the war were dead in 1945. Almost every Dutch-Jewish family name you'll find nowadays is mentioned in the In Memoriam as well. There are, for example, five pages of Van Praags in that book.

The handful of survivors had a major impact on football. The Great Ajax from the early 1970s, was - in a way - partially formed by the Holocaust.

Sjaak Swart, son of a Christian mother and a Jewish father and born two years before the war, told the Nieuw Israelietisch Weekblad ('New Israelite Weekly'): "My father had seven brothers. Those brothers, his sister, his father and his mother were taken away. We still had a pretty large family of Jews, though. I was on familiar terms with a lot of Jews."

Jaap van Praag, who'd been in hiding in a house on Overtoom, where he could hardly move for three years, lost his little sister and his parents. He would hardly talk about it later. If his son Michael would ask questions about it, he'd shout: "I do not want to talk about that - and that's final!"

Salo Muller is now a close-fisted man in his 60s, living in a beautiful house behind the Concert Hall; a few kilometers from the Rivierenbuurt ('River District') where he used to live with his parents. He was six years old the last time he saw them. They were standing amongst hundreds of Jews, driven together on the stage of the Dutch Theatre. Muller, the legendary Ajax masseur, wearing an Ajax pin on the lapel of his blazer, says: "I wanted to go towards them, but a German took me away. I've been screaming in that children's crèche for a week."

I am writing this book in a former Jewish hospital on Henri Polaklaan. One of the houses behind the premises, on Plantage Middenlaan, used to be the crèche in which children like Muller waited for their deportation. About 1,100 of them were saved by chrèche personnel. Some of them escaped through the room I am now working in.

Salo Muller escaped, too. He survived the war living in eight different hiding addresses. Sometimes he was raised as a Catholic, sometimes as a Protestant. "I didn't even know my name, I didn't know when my birthday was, I've seen my parents standing on the stage of that theater. I've got a war trauma, too." After the liberation, he found out that his parents were gassed. A sister of his mother took pity on him, and so, "weird enough," he returned to the Rivierenbuurt.

Bennie Muller (1938) and Maup Caransa (1916) were boys from Rapenburgerstraat, in the Jewish quarter. In the time Caransa was a growing up boy over there, and Muller made his first steps, the street was the heart of the Amsterdam Jewish society. The famous Torah School Beth Hamidrash was there and so was the equally famous café De Druif ('The Grape'). At numbers 169 and 171 was an orthodox Jewish girls' orphanage, next door was a synagogue, and next door to that the Dutch Israelite Seminar, a branch of the Ben Hamidrash. About sixty students went to school there.

Caransa, one out of five children of a coal-dealer, was a tall, sandy-haired and blue-eyed boy, who didn't look Jewish at all. He wrote me a letter, saying he 'can't remember ever to have paid any attention to Ajax before World War Two, because there was just no money and time to do so'. He sang at services at the Portugese synagogue, and pushed a car around at the age of twelve, selling oil and coal. Many decades later, as Caransa had become the owner of large patches of Amsterdam, old friends would still call him 'the oil man' or 'the Portugese'. People say that he once answered an Arab sheik, who asked him what he did for a living: "I started out in the oil business, just like you."

In 1936, his father Salomon won the lottery, a prize of 100,000 guilders. Until the money was safely brought to the bank, Caransa and his three brothers would lie behind the front door, armed with an axe. The future of the family seemed secured. Caransa went to Paris for six weeks and spent 850 guilders there, which was more than he carried with him.

Back home he got a beating from his father. His mother, Rachel, told him: "You are too lazy to work!" Maup packed a towel and some soap in a small suitcase, muttered "I don't need you people anyway" and left. He assorted laundry at the Jewish Home for the Disabled and got his food at the Spuistraat soup-kitchen. In 1941, he married a Catholic woman. In the nick of time. His marriage and his non-Jewish looks saved him from deportation, although he was imprisoned at Westerbork transit camp for thirteen weeks.

He lived in the Jewish quarter during the rest of the war, on the corner of Zwanenburgwal and Waterlooplein, in a house that's now overshadowed by the Stopera, Amsterdam's integrated Opera Hall and City Counsil. Het told newspaper Het Parool in 1969: "I thought: when my parents come back from the war, at least they'll know where to find me. They never returned. Neither did my brothers." Caransa and his sister Femma were the only ones left.

Bennie Muller exactly recalls the day his mother was taken away. He told British journalist David Winner: "I had two brothers and two sisters. We, the kids, were all standing there crying. The Germans said: 'Oh well, let's leave them alone', but the Dutch Nazi's said no."

Mrs. Muller was sent to Westerbork, but was saved because of her marriage to a non-Jewish man. According to Bennie Muller, about 150 of her relatives perished.

Rapenburgerstraat was deserted and quiet after the liberation. The girl's orphanage was cleared out by the Nazi's on 10 February 1943. Almost all Seminar students were dead. The synagogue was looted, and almost all the buildings were destroyed by Amsterdammers searching for fire-wood.

Today, Rapenburgerstraat is two streets, sort of. The even side mainly consists of proper, new-built appartment blocks. On the odd-numbered side, there's still something left of Muller's and Caransa's street. That is: a lot of the old façades are still intact, but only the Hebrew characters over the front door of Beth Hamidrash indicate that Jews were once living here. The NIW editorship resides in the building, nowadays, and so does the 4 And 5 May Memorial Committee. The girl's orphanage is now Café-Bar Waterlooplein 77.

* * *

Referee Leo Horn moved from southern town Sittard to Amsterdam as a child. He would later call that removal 'the first liberation of my life'. Horn, who was expelled from the Dutch Football Association in 1941 because he was Jewish, and his friend Kuki Krol (father of seventies Ajax player Ruud Krol) joined an Amsterdam based resistance group. Horn's brother George and some other Jews went in hiding in Krol's house.

Horn's pen-names in the resistance were 'doctor Van Dongen' or 'engineer Varing'. His fellow resistance people did not know who he really was, either. His colleague Wim Kuijt once whispered in Horn's ear: "Do you think Jews would have the guts to do what we do?"

Horn used to hide a lot of Jews at number 9, Nicolaas Witsenkade. With a so-called 'hold-up unit', he held up two German munition-wagons in the Spring of 1945, leaving ten German soldiers behind, trussed up and gagged. Dressed in a white doctor's coat and a stethoscope, 'doctor Van Dongen' smuggled 'a key underground-person', wanted by the Gestapo, into the 'Wilhelmina Gasthuis' hospital.

Horn's brother Edgar was murdered in the concentration camps. Leo Horn, the most famous referee in Dutch football history, swallowed Morgadon tranquillizers from 5 May 1945 until his death in 1995.

The father of Rob Cohen (now father-in-law and personal manager of Ronald de Boer), survived the war thanks to a mixed marriage as well. As a child he watched from a roof how the Germans took his parents away from Weesperstraat. He lost two brothers and a sister. After Cohen died, his family found a letter in his wallet, which contained the story of her death in Auschwitz.

In his cigar shop - an Ajax team picture from the sixties is over the door - Bennie Muller would rather not talk about Jewish matters. Muller (whose bluff hair makes him look not Jewish at all) raises his hands to his head and rubs his eyelids: "Do I have to? Everything will be dragged up again." He shows me into the back room, hands me a chair 'for two minutes' and talks for the next hour and a half.

I talked to Sjaak Swart on a terrible Amsterdam rainy day in his restaurant inside Jaap Eden Sports Hall. I did not tell him the exact truth. I knew he does not like talking about his Jewish identity, so I've told him I wanted to interview him for The Financial Times, about Ajax' centenary. I hope he'll forgive me for the fact that he's in this book, too.

Swart and Muller played their first game together in 1947, for TDW, a club that disappeared a long time ago. Almost all the pre-war Jewish clubs were gone, so the Jews had to play football somewhere else.

It's of major significance that they played for that club. What would have happened if they had not been born in 1938, but in 1902, like Eddy Hamel? They would probably have ended up playing for a working-class Jewish club like AED. They were no rich kids from South, or middle-class boys from the Transvaalbuurt. Maybe they would have become heroes of Jewish Amsterdam with AED, but maybe they would never have made it to Ajax. Or the opportunity to join Ajax would have come too late, like it happened to Johnny Roeg, and they would probably have played the second fiddle.

But the Holocaust took place when they were toddlers. And so it could occur that Muller joined Ajax at the age of ten. And working-class boy Swart was assigned the right forward spot that was once occupied by Eddy Hamel, the gentleman. The small number of remaining Jews were provided better opportunities after the war, in the whole of Holland.

In his restaurant, I ask Swart what his first club was. "Oh, that's nice", he says, "just across the street from here, close by. A small club, called OVVO." I remind him of the fact that he and Muller played for TDW first. Damn yes, he remembered: "We played one game together, and I still remember the opponent: PCVB!"

After that, Swart joined OVVO, with which club he scored five goals against an Ajax youth team. "Why don't you join us?", an Ajax team leader asked. Swart: "My dad was a huge fan of Ajax, almost from the time the club was founded, and he would bring me along to Ajax on his bike. So it was not that hard to say 'yes'."

I did not dare to ask Swart straight-forward questions about Jewish matters. But towards the end of our conversation, after he had comprehensively told me about his success as a player, I asked what kind of player his dad used to be. Swart: "He was a fast winger, my father. Good shot, but technically he was not as good as his son."

"With what club did he play?" I asked.

Swart, in the mean time, had received some hard to describe signals across the table, over our coffee cups. Signals of the type that's exchanged by Freemasons. I've got dark hair and dark skin, a broad nose and a wide mouth. I had displayed interest in Bennie Muller. I had asked Swart about his family. I knew that Ajax' money-lenders Wim and Freek van der Meyden built pill-boxes for the Germans during the war. And as I asked Swart about his dad, he replied: "He played for AED - you've heard about that club, of course - as well as for OVVO and TDW."

Nobody knows AED. Maybe there's a small number of old men in Amsterdam, Tel Aviv or New York that still know that little neighborhood club, that played its last game in 1941. Swart just wanted to make clear to me: I am one, you are one.

I said: "Of course I know AED."

* * *

Salo Muller fanatically started practicing sports. "It was an attempt to make up for everything I'd missed during the war", he says. He subscribed with rowing club Amstel, but the ballot-committee rejected him, ensuring him that he would feel better at home with the 'Jewish' Poseidon. Every Jew I have interviewed for this book was abused for being Jewish at some point, but Muller is the only one of them to have been rejected somewhere, after the war.

Sjaak Swart made his debut in Ajax-1 on 16 September 1956. Bennie Muller followed on 5 January 1958. Salo Muller joined the club as a masseur in 1959. Ajax was a mediocre semi-professional football club in those days, of lesser international significance than Blackpool from England or Rot-Weiss Essen from Germany.

* * *

On the square of Rembrandtplein, just a few minutes away from the deserted Jewish quarter, Rob Cohen's father owned a sandwich shop called De Kuil ('The Pit'). Being expelled from his two butcher's shops on Weesperstraat by the Germans, Cohen senior had, according to his son 'rushed into his work for 100,000%'. Thus, he built himself a chain of butcher's shops.

At De Kuil, located where you'll find bar-restaurant Rhapsody nowadays, you would walk down two staircases before entering a white-marble room, in which beef sausages hung from the ceiling. Rinus Michels, Ajax' centre forward in the 1950s, often dropped by so he could spy upon one of the employees: Wil, who was later to become his wife.

Sitting in his bar-restaurant Soccer World, at the ArenA, Rob Cohen says: "De Kuil was a famous Jewish sandwich shop - not kosher." Jews would go there to buy a sandwich and have a chat with some sort of imaginary family.

Cohen: "Everybody knows that generation. If something happened, a daughter getting married or so, they would all come by." The most famous customers of De Kuil were Maup Caransa and his rival, Japie Kroonenberg. Like Caransa, Kroonenberg was a native from a very poor family, who married a Christian wife and became a real estate tycoon.

Cohen says: "All of a sudden, Caransa would buy the Schiller Hotel, for example. That was marvellous, of course: reading that Jaap Kroonenberg or Caransa had bought a hotel, or five hotels. In those days, they really were sensational people."

Times were different, back then, in a poorer Amsterdam, with less big companies. The papers were full of news about a handful of local tycoons, most of them Jews. In articles from 35 years ago, you find breath-taking articles about Caransa buying the Doelen Hotel, possessing a self-portrait by Rembrandt, driving a Rolls Royce.

On Sundays, people travelled to Ajax from De Kuil. Cohen: "One person would have a parking licence and six people would board that person's car. Or they'd take tram 9. It was a jumble of people: Jews, and people with a Jewish heart. My dad was on the main stand at De Meer. It's a shame he's never seen my son-in-law play." As most people know, his son-in-law is Ronald de Boer.

Cohen: "All people I knew went to Ajax, except myself. It was a way to find distraction. There was not much entertainment for people to enjoy, but there were a lot of things they wanted to forget. I've never seen my father laying his head on the table, saying 'God, what have they done to me?'."

* * *

If you want to understand the connection between the Jews and Ajax, you should read Leon de Winter's novel Supertex. I'll get back to that later. I now want to talk about the main character in that novel: textile tycoon, Simon Breslauer.

Breslauer is the only person from his family to have survived the war; he rushed into his work and in this way he set up the flourishing textile company Supertex. De Winter writes: 'My father was an exacting man, who worked fifteen hours a day. He had a short-tempered nature, which could turn a smile into an angry grimace within an eye-wink. He always wore an irreproachable suit and had the looks of a ladies' man.'

In many ways, Simon Breslauer is a typical example of a Jewish man who survived the war. They did not want to think about what had happened. Getting over it was impossible, anyway. They had children right away (a lot of Dutch Jews were born in 1946 and 1947) and named them after relatives that got murdered. After that, they founded a business, because they never ever wanted to be dependent on someone else again.

Before the war, many Jews already had a business of their own (they could not find employment elsewhere), but the Breslauers were of a new kind. One of their sons says: "There's the ones who survived with their parents, and the ones who survived without them. They're both meshuggah."

Jaap van Praag decided to wear perfect suits for the rest of his life and he wanted to quit working on the age of 45. Using a loan from his friend, Piet Smit, he re-started the company of his father, Mozes.

Leo Horn started a textile shop during the war. He moved to Jodenbreestraat in 1946, renting a building from Caransa. Horn owned 31 branches at a certain point. Decades later, he would tell newspaper Trouw: "I kept myself busy with my family and my business. I just did not want to think about that damned war anymore."

Maup Caransa bought his first premises in Amsterdam in 1946: a little house in the area called Kattenburg, costing 750 guilders. He'd later say: "Then I thought: if I've got twenty of those houses, I'll make a hundred guilders a week and I'll never have to work again in my life." It turned out to be slightly different, because people did not pay their rent.

Despite this, Caransa 'made it': in real estate, in car tires, jeans, rain coats, army supplies. As far as real estate is concerned: he mainly bought premises he knew from before the war. He ended up possessing almost the entire squares of Waterlooplein - "not for business purposes, it's private property" - and Rembrandtplein, which tram drivers would sometimes ironically announce as 'Caransaplein' ('Caransa Square'). "I've rushed into work", Caransa once said.

The Breslauers from De Winter's book wanted to make money so they could give it all to their children, so they were able to save themselves if the Nazi's would come back. The Christians had proved themselves un-reliable. Most of the Breslauers did not want to be chic: they did not feel like becoming chairmen of hockey clubs, or members of museum boards. They did not want to repudiate the place where their parents had emerged from. "I am not a culture-man", Caransa would often say.

Many of the Brealauers were hoping to withdraw from the world of business one day. It did not happen. Meijer Stad did not sell his company before he was 80 years old, Jaap van Praag inspected his shops at Schiphol Airport on a daily basis, and Caransa - well in his eighties - is still in business. The man is worth an estimated hundred million guilders; Rob Cohen thinks it's much more than that.

Not all men of Caransa's generation became 'Breslauers'. Some of them became human wrecks for the rest of their lives, or committed suicide. Others displayed a quite normal attitude towards their work. In the world of Ajax, however, most Jews were Breslauer-like men.

Caransa, his friend Appie Plotske (textile vendor on Nieuwendijk), Kroonenberg, Cohen's father, Leo and George Horn - they all went to Ajax. Dutch football was 'professional' since 1954, but the payments were not too high.

Big companies like the ABN or Amro Banks were far too snooty for the world of sports. Clubs depended on the quarters paid by the spectators and the help of the occasional proletarian business man. Van Zoest, the Ajax historian, says: "There never was any money, they always had to barter. Ajax has been too stingy to pay for anything until the early 1990s."

Sometimes the club was paid money, sometimes some people just did the club some favours. The records, played during the half-time break of games in De Meer, came from Jaap van Praag's store at the Spui square. From 1950 to 1970 it usually was De Ajax-Marsch ('The Ajax March'), sung by his brother Max.

If Ajax would win the Dutch championship, father Cohen would pay for dinner for the team, at De Kuil. Before the famous 'fog match' against Liverpool, in 1966, Caransa organized a lunch for the boards of both clubs, at the Doelen Hotel.

Walking along the tables, he shouted: "I am just crazy about Ajax! I am totally confused!"

Left winger Piet Keizer used to drag bales of cloth in Leo Horn's store; defender Ruud Krol would later learn how to weave in George Horn's company. Isaac Koekoek and Max Polak, Rob Cohen's father-in-law, would sometimes hire Ajax players, too.

On behalf of Ajax, Leo Horn accompanied the referees assigned to lead European Ajax games. "If they want YabYum, they'll get Yab Yum", was his device. According to Horn, the referees would often give Ajax the benefit of the doubt. If he was assigned to lead an Ajax league game himself, people at the club would say: "That's all settled then!" Horn was known as an Ajax supporter, who once amicably tapped Sjaak Swart on the bottom after he had fouled Feyenoord player Gerard Kerkum.

Swart: "Leo Horn might have been an Ajax fan, but if he whistled our games, he was rather against us. Frans Derks usually favored us, even though he didn't have the reputation of being an Ajax fan, but he hated the 'Krauts'" I think Swart is hereby referring to the image of the Golden Ajax: a 'Jew's club'.

You could, in a way, call it a Jewish family. Alright, they were not related, but a lot of Jewish familes were sort of 'put together' in this fashion, after the war. A survivor of about the same age as your grandpa, who got gassed, became your new grandpa. You'd call someone else 'uncle', you's make up new cousins - all in order to try and continue with your life. The situation at Ajax was similar.

Salo Muller, the masseur who had Caransa and Kroonenberg as two of his clients, explains: "You see, in sports you approach other people in a pretty spontaneous, straight-forward way. If Caransa entered the room, he would hug me. Peter Post, the racing cyclist, did the same. And if I bumped into Japie Kroonenberg, in town, he would always be very kind, shouting: 'Hey, are you making some money these days, or what?'"

According to the cliché, a football club is a family, which definitely goes for the people who don't have a real family anymore. The Ajax family was perfect as Jaap van Praag became the club's chairman, on 16 July, 1964. He was regarded as a temporary chairman. Jan Melchers, the chairman who got dumped to make way for Van Praag, was quoted saying: "The good million guilders we saved, will now probably be gone pretty soon."

Two sugar uncles and members of the Ajax family of that time were definitely not Jewish: Wim and Freek van der Meyden. Old Ajacieden still refer to that duo as 'the pill-box builders'. Maybe those pill-boxes prevented them from becoming members of the Ajax board, but the two donors did become official members in the Summer of 1965. They had a certain power over the players, whom they would lend money to buy houses or cigar stores with.

They had nothing against Jews. Salo Muller remembers that one of the two (people almost never distinguish between Wim and Freek) showed a photograph of the synagogue on Linnaueusstraat, which they had helped to restore. Even Cohen took advantage of them. A year after his marriage, as he still had no place to live, his father-in-law had a chat with Kroonenberg, who had a chat with one of the Van der Meydens, whose son-in-law ended up arranging a house for Cohen, on Bolestein in the Jewish area of Buitenveldert. Over there, Cohen became the neighbor of Ajax player Theo van Duivenbode, be it coincidental or not.

Swart told me: "I had a cigar store. Wim and Freek definitely helped me with that." "The pill-box builders", I replied, in a Pavlov-reaction to hearing their names. Swart said: "I don't know. Yes, so people say. But no, we should not talk about that. We definitely should not talk about just that."

How much money the Van der Meydens and the several 'Breslauers' invested in Ajax will never be revealed. Van Zoest says: "It all happened under the table, in some sort of dodgy circuit. Caransa was always talked about in a mysterious way." Newspapers would sometimes, ironically, call Ajax 'Caransajax'.

Round 1965, the club suddenly started to spend shocking amounts of money. Co Prins was bought back from German club Kaiserslautern for 120,000 Deutschmarks, goalkeeper Gert Bals switched from PSV to Ajax and Ajax even paid 375,000 guilders to Feyenoord for Henk Groot: such an enormous amount that the club decided not to reveal it to the public. It was said that Ajax had initially tried to swap Groot for Bennie Muller. "Sheer nonsense", said Jaap van Praag about the rumour that Caransa had paid the transfer fee for Groot.

In a forgotten book from the 1960s, called Ajax: Een Klasse Apart ('Ajax: A Class Apart'), written by Gerth van Zanten, Van Praag is quoted saying: 'Caransa is totally nuts about Ajax. He provides us some advice, every now and then. That's something completely different than him deciding what happens within the club. He once gave us this advice: if we wanted to roof over the new stand, we should float a debenture-loan. That turned out to be a golden advice. But 'Caransajax' is annoying, as if he's some kind of a dictator.'

This may be true or not ("I have never caught Jaap van Praag speaking the truth", Johan Cruiyff once said), but Maup Caransa was definitely a well-respected man at Ajax. He's said to have had plans for a big, new stadium in Buitenveldert, because De Meer was too small and very hard to reach by car. He wanted big companies to invest in football. Caransa himself invested in several Amsterdam clubs.

He flew along with the team for the away game against Liverpool in 1966. Aboard the plane, he lost a game of poker, first against Johan Cruyff and after that against Piet Keizer. (Van Zanten recalls: 'The pool was well forced up, as Keizer wiped away Caransa's three aces with a full house.').

After the arrival in Liverpool, Caransa said: "If you guys score me one in the first fifteen minutes, I've got an additional bonus waiting for you."

Cruyff: "I'll talk it over with the guys. But you know we only talk about large amounts, just like yourself."

Caransa: "I never calculate with a loss."

Without Cruyff, there would have been no Golden Ajax. But maybe there would have been no Golden Ajax without the Breslauers either. Let's go back to the 1963-1964 season, the year before Van Praag became chairman and Cruyff made his debut in the first team. DWS won the title, Ajax was fifth, and in that year's Eredivisie, Blauw Wit was playing as well. De Volewijckers relegated the year before. In other words: Ajax had plenty of competition, even within Amsterdam.

But the Breslauers made the difference. It did not require that much money: as Bennie Muller received an interesting offer from Belgium's Standard Liege in 1962, Ajax raised his salary to 7,000 guilders.

An Amsterdam talent probably preferred Ajax over DWS, because finding a job in the textile sector was well possible at Ajax. The conditions at Ajax, which Johan Cruyff would always talk about, were the best.

At Ajax, you'd have the opportunity to play with well-payed, famous players such as Henk Groot and Co Prins. Captain Bennie Muller, who had played five games for Oranje, the Dutch national team, and Sjaak Swart, the gifted right winger ("I belong to the category of Garrincha, Matthews and Swart"), played there since their childhood.